Hierarchical Denoising Entire Space Multi-Task Model for Post-Click Conversion Rate Prediction with Noisy Labels

The post-click Conversion Rate (CVR) prediction plays a pivotal role in industrial recommender systems, directly serving as a decisive factor for ranking strategies and revenue optimization. While Entire Space Multi-Task Models (e.g., ESMM) have become the dominant framework by effectively addressing sample selection bias and data sparsity, they rely heavily on the assumption that the observed click and conversion labels perfectly reflect user preferences. In real-world scenarios, however, observed data is inevitably contaminated by label noise. Crucially, within the entire space modeling framework, this noise exhibits a complex hierarchical structure, where the superimposition of noise from antecedent click labels and subsequent conversion labels results in conventional single-task denoising methods being ineffective. To bridge this gap, we propose HiDe-ESMM (Hierarchical Denoising Entire Space Multi-Task Model), a unified framework designed to systematically mitigate hierarchical label noise. First, adopting the loss correction paradigm, we derive a statistically unbiased CTCVR loss via backward correction and identify the requisite noise rates based on the weak separability assumption. Second, to alleviate the numerical instability inherent in the unbiased loss approach, we introduce a robust forward correction strategy as an efficient alternative and theoretically prove the consistency of its optimal solution with the optimal solution on clean data. Extensive experiments on one semi-synthetic dataset and two real-world industrial datasets demonstrate that HiDe-ESMM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, validating its robustness in handling hierarchical noisy labels.